Malgoska Szumowska's 'In The Name Of' Wins Teddy Award At Berlinale

By
On Top Magazine Staff
Published:
February 16, 2013

Malgoska Szumowska's In The Name Of
has won the Teddy Award at the 63rd Berlin
International Festival, also known as Berlinale.

In the film, a Catholic priest named
Adam (played by Andrzej Chyra) takes over a small parish in rural
Poland where he works with teenagers with behavioral problems.
Father Adam, who answered his calling at the relatively late age of
21, entered the priesthood to escape his fears about his sexuality.
When he meets Lukasz, the son of a simple rural family, Adam is
forced to confront a long forgotten passion.

“The story came to me kind of from a
newspaper,” Szumowska said during a Belinale press conference. “I
found a small article in the press about young boy who killed the
priest. Of course, in our film nobody kill the priest. But I found
it very interesting because nobody knows why it happened. And out of
this short sentence I start to think about love story between a young
man and the priest.”

In awarding In The Name Of the
Teddy for best feature film at the festival, the 9-member jury
praised it for daring to “challenge the stereotypes of
homosexuality versus religion with a personal story, told in a deeply
humane way.”

Concussion won a Special Jury
Award, while Bambi won best documentary.

Bambi, which
premiered at Berlinale, documents the life of a showgirl
who performed for 20 years at Le Carrousel de Paris. Working under
the stage name of Bambi, Marie-Pierre Pruvot was a transgender
pioneer.

The
Teddy, now in its 27th
year, recognizes the best LGBT cinema at the festival. In 2010,
American director Lisa Cholodenko took home the prize with the
lesbian moms movie The Kids Are All Right.